


Once Upon a Time...

by Book_buried_Batter



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: it's just mentioned and sometimes hinted at, like literally everyone but sans is just kinda mentioned, so you know, there's like... kinda death?, this is supposed to be super subtle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-15
Updated: 2017-09-15
Packaged: 2018-12-29 23:12:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12095532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Book_buried_Batter/pseuds/Book_buried_Batter
Summary: So today, Undertale turns 2 years old! It seems like just yesterday, it had only turned one…The game still holds a special place in my heart and always will, seeing as it’s honestly kinda shaped who I am. So in honor of this beautiful thing, I’ve written something rather long.I wrote this thing because I realized that I had scheduled myself to share a piece of my writing with my creative writing class and then went hey, isn’t that Undertale’s anniversary?! So I busted this out in a couple days and polished it up really nice (I hope).This is a retelling of the opening of the game, or the story of the war that trapped the monsters underground, but from Sans’s point of view. However, I don’t directly state that as this was meant to be shared with people going in blind. Either way, enjoy!





	Once Upon a Time...

**Author's Note:**

> Fucking cheesy-ass title, I know, and I don't care. I'm terrible with titles.

Many thousands of years ago, there was a civil war. A war that destroyed most of the world as we knew it. Not many of us were left when the dust settled. Families were torn apart, separated, some totally lost. In the battle, our king was badly wounded, but still willing to lead us to his dying breath. There wasn’t even a single casualty on the opposing side. Our lives destroyed, we were forced underground and away from the sun. The caves held hardly any light, only dim crystals in irregular places guiding our way to the end of the cavern we retreated into. On our way there, we passed through many individual chambers, each with its own climate. My father, a scientist turned warrior in the battle,explained to me how it meant this place was huge. One chamber held a burning heat like the heart of a volcano, another was humid but somehow still cold with strange, glowing vegetation in the swampy grasses covering the ground. Then there was a frozen wasteland with snow whipping all around us. It seemed impossible. When the living remains of our civilization reached the other end, we decided to make our claim there, at least for a time, as it was the only place out of an extreme. With what little manpower and resources we had left, we managed to light the new world around us. We soon found that some who were left had disappeared in the twists and turns of this underworld and it wasn’t until years later that we found them. They had turned feral and aggressive, ready to attack anyone, even their own families. It was hard, but we left them be. We had no other choice unless we wanted to kill them. During that time of first settlement, with the help of the queen, our king survived his wounds. He went around to each family to console them, especially my own. The loss of my mother hit him as hard as it did my father. Holding my infant brother, he cried with us. He hadn’t done that with anyone else. Family was the most important thing to us all for thousands of years after that.

We colonized the caves. Our new palace was built out of purple stone at the end, where we lived while we learned about our new home. Over an incredible amount of time, each part of our land was made hospitable, most people adapting to live where they chose. It was another thousand or so years before we were able to stop using the crystals as a light source and recreated what we had on the surface. Things moved quickly from there. So quickly that in the next couple hundred years, our king moved from his palace at the end to the only opening in the cavern, replicating his home there and letting the past fall to ruin. That place was sealed and all but forgotten, giving us a true fresh start. The world was powered, homes and villages were established by now, an economy rebuilding itself using the ore we mined while building as our currency. 

I was small when we were forced away from the surface, hardly more than a toddler. My little brother was even younger. I found myself watching him most of the time while our father worked as the king’s head scientist. He’s the one that brought artificial light to our new home. He chose for us to live in the snow, making sure houses were constructed as soon as lights were established so we had a safe place to be while he worked. He was sometimes gone for days at a time. Somehow we still never grew apart. I was thankful for that, for my brother’s sake. He would never have to miss our mother like my father and I. I have to admit that I was always just a little envious of him for this, the events of the war didn’t hang over him like they did for me. But I always did my best to keep it that way. Over time, things started to be okay again. There were lights, food, jobs, I was safe and my brother was well-fed and learning more every day. I began to study the stars and secrets of the universe from books spared by the war in the spare time I got.  
Another thousand years passed and we lost our father. We were told it was a “work-related accident”, that he had been trying to improve the system already in place and had fallen into his creation. The king himself came to tell me this. I’d never cried so hard. Then I realized someone would have to explain to my brother, barely a toddler, that our father was never coming home. I’d never seen him in such a state. For the next two days, he waited by the door, expecting our father to walk through at any moment like he had just been working late. I could feel it break my heart and I could feel those pieces of it shatter when we had to leave the house. That was the only time my brother threw a tantrum. The king and queen took us in after that. Our house was reserved for us so that, once I was old enough, we could have it back if we wanted. I didn’t know how to feel about it. The king treated us as his own, even after he had a son himself. The prince became another brother to us.  
Two centuries later, something happened. A new human came to us, a person from the surface world. They came to us injured and scared. The royal family was always one with a soft heart. They took the child in, along with us three and they fit right in. But… things happened so much more quickly than before. Only five years and the new human had fallen deathly ill. We tried to keep this information from my brother and the prince as long as we could, so when the human died, they were shocked. The prince was devastated at having lost a sibling. He wasn’t thinking right. Or at all. Without a warning, he took his sibling’s body and fled the castle. The king was calling to him, making his attempt to follow. But then his son reached the opening of the cavern- and went through. We had no idea what he would be facing out there. We weren’t sure we were strong enough to follow him and find out. He returned almost a day later, his sibling’s body still clutched in his arms. The prince was injured, all manner of wounds covering him. His mother went to him, but it was too late. He said that the surface people had done this to him and collapsed there in the castle. Within moments, he was gone. The queen, filled with grief at having lost two children in one night, left. She hadn’t been heard from since, but the king assures us all she’s not gone or he would have felt it.

Not long after that, we were offered our home back. It was painful to go back. It was more painful to stay in the castle. The last time anyone had touched the items in our home, it was when we lost our father. My brother helped me take down old pictures and clean out his room. All his belongings and the pictures were put in the shed out back, which we agreed would remain locked at all times. I moved into our father’s old room with the bare minimum since I would never have the heart to change much. At first, it was strange not sharing a room with my brother, especially when the nightmares started. But I would never tell him that, he had other things like school to worry about. And his dream of becoming a royal guardsman.  
When we moved back into that house, a lot in the town had changed. There was a library now and an inn near the town line with a little gift shop attached. And of course even more houses. The best new thing was the diner, though. The place was always bathed in a warm orange glow and smelled of freshly made food and comfort. A few leather booths sat off to one side and under the pop-out window in front with a few weathered wooden tables scattered around the rest of the floorspace. It became a bit of a hotspot for the local royal guardsmen to relax when they weren't on call, which no one minded. That diner was the best place to get a burger when there was time, too. The food is all made by hand by the owner of the place, a tall man always dressed in a nice vest and bowtie, small glasses balancing on the end of his nose. He had been my first audience when I found a fascination for terrible jokes, only partially because he was mute and couldn’t stop me unless he walked away. I knew he was too polite for that. His laugh turned out to be the most mesmerizing thing once I got it out of him. After that first time, I could never get enough of it. He seemed self-conscious of his laugh and his smile, always covering his mouth when he did. For some unknown reason,I found it endearing. I tried to take my brother with me whenever I went to the diner, but he soon got tired of the food being too greasy and how many bad jokes I was telling. By that time, he was about the age of a teenager, not even a milkshake could appease him for long enough to get a good pun or two in. It was after my brother stopped coming with me that the bartender invited me into the back of the diner with a point of his finger and a warm smile my way.   
In the back, what I had assumed to just be a kitchen was, in fact, his home. The door did lead directly into his kitchen but turned into a cozy living room, then turned down a hallway with two doors- two bedrooms, I would guess. One door was closed and decorated in a way that made me think a unicorn had vomited on it, there were so many rainbows and so much glitter. That told me he had a daughter. Once the door to his diner was closed again, the bartender turned to me and asked out loud if I wanted something to drink. Stunned by the incredible sound of his voice, I said the first thing that came to mind; ketchup. I had never seen him laugh so hard at one of my stupid jokes. He doubled over right there in his kitchen, laughing and turning a bright shade of red. Seeing his reaction, I had to laugh too and when his head came up, there were tears streaming down his face. The next time I went to get a burger, he set a full bottle of ketchup in front of me, looking over the rim of his glasses with a small smile. In a moment of brilliance, I did the first thing I could think of. Now I look at it as a mistake, but not something I entirely regret. I picked up the bottle and squirted a generous amount of the condiment in my mouth. The bartender’s jaw dropped. That was the only time he tried to counter my humor.

A few more centuries passed. A new head of the royal guard was trained and hired by the king himself. She soon became friends with my brother, to my surprise. It looked like he would get a chance at his dream after all. On the other hand, I was working full time and more since the king couldn’t support us anymore. I didn’t blame him. I got myself a few different jobs after that, finally feeling like I was in a place to handle it. I worked as a sentry, a waiter and my personal favorite- a comedian. I’ve never really thought of myself as that funny, most of my jokes were cringeworthy at most, but every time I went on stage, the audience ate it up. It was during one of my first real shows that panic erupted in the crowed. Another person from the surface had found their way to us. No one had any idea what to do, but the underworld turned frantic in what I gathered to be a few hours, maybe less. With the instant messaging network the new head scientist had created and installed, that didn’t surprise me. After the cautions of the king against people on the surface, the panic was no surprise either. I wouldn’t let myself join in it, though. I would be one to act. I talked to as many coherent people as possible before they evacuated to find out where it was. Turned out it hadn’t made it very much farther from the old ruins than the first crossroads of the wasteland.  
As quickly as everything had started, it was over. The first human was disposed of. The king addressed his people, restating his previous warnings about people from the surface. And I vowed that I wouldn’t let something like that happen again. It figured that the one day I wasn’t doing my sentry work that something slipped past the barrier. I quit my job as a comedian, much to the dismay of the venue I worked for. That didn’t much matter to me, I had to take more shifts as a sentry. It meant hardly seeing my brother anymore, but he still came to visit me wherever I ended up in between training sessions. What no one besides the king ever figured out was that in the next two hundred years, six more from the surface came to us. They were taken care of as soon as I had my sights on them and the king thought it better not to let his citizens know, sure that paranoia would set in if he did. I was in full agreement with this.  
As for my comedy, I had to resort to telling my awful jokes to the door to the ruins, which was near my furthest outpost. This went on for a few years my jokes to the locked door, until one day, there was a “who’s there” to my “knock-knock”. I didn’t know who or what it could be, maybe one of the descendants of the feral people lost in the dark. But the last I had seen, they lost their ability to speak far too long ago. With not much else to my life, I didn’t question it- or the woman behind the door as to who she was. Until she asked me to make a promise. I didn’t like making promises. Promises were made to be broken. I didn’t have the heart to flat out say no, she just had a certain integrity about her I couldn’t place. She asked me to watch over the next kid that came through that door, if a kid came through that door, and protect them. That woman must have been as unaware of what I’d been doing as the citizens of the underworld.

So when a kid did come through that door a little later that year, covered in dust, I knew I couldn’t keep that promise. I’d never felt anything truly evil until then. It’s a feeling deep in my bones that says something isn’t right. The feeling when they shook my hand for the first time sent a chill up my spine and gave me a feeling that was indescribable, at best. Nothing about it even felt human, despite how it looked. The way it had shuffled its way through the snow gripping its weapon, its lifeless eyes when it turned to look at me… I knew things would be different this time. It didn’t even react to my first joke, one that humans in the past had at least laughed at out of fear for my reaction.  
“Okay, that’s fine. Everyone’s got their own sense of humor.” I said to it with a shrug. “I’m Sans. Sans the skeleton.” Then I thought to myself, And I’ll make your life a living hell, you little weirdo.

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE leave some feedback! If you actually feel like doing so, I'm looking more for stuff with my writing style and grammar. Tell me everything, things that were good, things that weren't, I really need to know!


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